The Sign (24 page)

He was stuck. He’d known it was a possibility going in, but he’d still gone ahead with it, thinking it worth the risk. Right now, as he listened to the approaching footsteps, he sorely regretted not going with his original firebombing plan. Then again, everything looked better with hindsight, especially when your back was up against a wall—or, in this case, a dense, impenetrable five-foot hedge.

There was more than one set of footsteps, and he figured there were at least two of them approaching. If they were going into the Merc, he’d have someone in his face in a matter of seconds. He crouched down, cheek to the ground, trying to get a handle on how many of them there were and which way they were heading. The backyard sloped upward. He couldn’t see anything for a tense moment, then one pair of shoes appeared—black brogues, the hard case’s shoes, he thought—closely followed by another. Two of them. Headed for the Merc. The hard case must have hit his alarm key fob, as the car beeped and the locks popped open with a loud snap.

Matt didn’t have a choice.

He coiled up, waiting, his ears straining to pick up the approaching footsteps. He heard a door click open, the driver’s door—and then a figure appeared on his side of the car, rounding the front right fender, a guy with high cheekbones and a brush cut that Matt thought he recognized from the car staking out Jabba’s place. Matt just sprung up before the guy could react, catching him by surprise and landing a crushing fist on his chin. Brush Cut’s face juddered sideways, twisting unnaturally around his neck, a loud, wet wheeze rushing out of his chest and mouth. He was tough and didn’t go down. Instead, he tried to turn in and fight back, but Matt was now close enough to inflict more serious damage and hooked him with a ferocious uppercut that lifted Brush Cut momentarily off his feet before sending him staggering backward.

Matt heard movement on the other side of the car and, from the corner of his eye, saw the hard case in the suit stepping back and reaching under his coat. Brush Cut was groggy and having a hard time staying on his feet. Matt grabbed him from behind, curling his left hand around the guy’s neck while diving his right hand under the guy’s jacket, praying his fingers would find a gun somewhere. On the other side of the Merc, the hard case had his own gun out. He chambered a round and raised the gun at Matt, with Brush Cut between them.

Matt hit pay dirt. Brush Cut had a handgun tucked under his jacket, in a belt holster on his right hip. Matt’s fingers found the gun’s ribbed grip and yanked it out. He raised it, his right arm extended, level with his hostage’s ear, and aimed it straight at the hard case.

“Get back,” Matt shouted, swinging the gun to his hostage’s head and back at the hard case.

He sidestepped to his left, putting the car between him and the hard case, who raised his left hand in a calming gesture while keeping his gun aimed at Matt’s face.

“Easy, Matt,” he said. “Just take it easy.”

“Who the fuck are you people?” Matt yelled, still edging sideways, his eyes darting left and right nervously, keeping tabs on the front and rear of the house.

“I’m impressed that you made it here, Matt,” the hard case said, clearly trying to work out how Matt had found them. “In fact, I’m pretty impressed by everything you’ve done since this thing started.”

Matt was now at the back corner of the Merc. The hard case wasn’t backing away. He was actually tracking Matt, sidestepping smoothly and moving closer to the Merc that was now between them, eyeing the surroundings with radarlike focus. There was something deeply unnerving about him. The missing ear and the scar, the bald head that tapered up in the shape of a bullet—and they only served as a backdrop to the real darkness that emanated from the ceramic-black eyes that looked like they’d been to hell and back without blinking, the dark, eyeliner-like eyelids that rimmed them, and the sharp eyebrows framing the stygian mask that brooded out of the center of his face.

“And what is this thing?” Matt rasped. “What the fuck’s going on? What happened to my brother?”

The hard case shook his face slightly, in a condescending, tut-tutting way. “You know what, Matt? You’re too concerned with the past. You need to think more about your future.”

Matt backed up another step. “What did you do to my brother?” he yelled again. “Is he still alive?”

The hard case didn’t flinch. He stayed unsettlingly calm, his cold eyes seemingly assessing Matt’s position and evaluating possible outcomes. “You’re messing around with something you really don’t want to be messing with,” he finally told him. “My advice to you is to let it go. Find yourself a nice, deep hole, bury your head down, and forget any of this ever happened. Or better still—”

—and he just squeezed the trigger, once, with no discernible emotion, just made a decision and acted on it without a trace of emotion. The round hit the guy Matt was holding up squarely in the chest—

“—let me put you in it.”

Matt felt Brush Cut jerk and felt a sudden burn at his own side, by his left ribs, but he didn’t have time to pause and check it out. He had to stay on his feet as everything rushed into a frenzied blur.

Brush Cut’s legs gave and he started to fall just as the hard case fired again, then again. One of the shots hit Brush Cut in the shoulder, the bullet exiting close to Matt’s crouched head, whizzing past his ear and splattering his face with blood and bone shards. Matt struggled to keep Brush Cut up, using him as a shield while firing back at the hard case, who ducked behind the Merc. He faltered backward, his eyes scanning around, the burning sensation in his left flank getting stronger with each step. The hard case came up for another shot, got Matt’s hostage in the thigh. Two more bodies rushed out of the back of the house, guns out. They saw Matt, crouched into firing positions, but they were wide open and Matt got one of them in the shoulder a split second after he realized it was the auburn-haired girl from the van, the night they took him and Vince Bellinger. She tumbled sideways as if her feet had been knocked out from under her. The other shooter dived behind the Merc and joined the hard case. Matt kept moving, still using the bloodied-if-not-dead Brush Cut as a shield, lugging his heavy body back toward the street, step by step, inch by inch, firing away every time he spotted a flash of skin. A couple of shots whizzed by and he retaliated with three more of his own, then his gun’s magazine spat out its last round and the slide locked in its open position.

He saw that the hard case and the other shooter cottoned onto it as soon as he did, and they emerged from cover with little concern. He looked around frantically and realized he was now only a couple of yards from the sidewalk. Summoning whatever energy he could muster, he dragged Brush Cut’s dead weight back a few steps before letting go of him and bolting into the street.

He didn’t look back. He just kept running, the spent gun in hand, hugging the parked cars before sprinting across the street and leaping onto the opposite sidewalk, putting a barrier of cars between him and the shooters’ line of fire, hoping one last round wouldn’t find him before he got to his Camry, wondering how badly he’d been hit already and whether or not he’d get the chance to find out.

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

A
s Gracie had predicted, they’d barely managed to beat the news crews to the monastery, and were now safely ensconced behind its walls. A growing number of cars and vans were gathering outside the gates. With the rest of the monks alarmed by the sudden activity—the monastery was home to almost two hundred of them—the abbot set out to calm them while dispatching Brother Ameen to talk to the journalists. The younger monk told those crowding the gates that Father Jerome had no comment as yet, and asked them to respect his privacy. The reporters protested loudly, but to no avail.

The siege had begun.

Gracie’s satphone was back up and running. There was no point in staying under the radar any longer. On the contrary. She, Dalton, and Finch were supremely well placed to trump their peers on this story, which was now monopolizing the screens at all the major news channels, commanding continuous coverage and constant live updates. Their exclusive was alive and well, and less than half an hour after getting back, they were sending their first “live” footage from the roof of the keep that abutted the monastery’s entrance gate.

Standing on top of the large, sand-colored cube, Gracie weighed her words carefully as she faced the lens of Dalton’s camera.

“He hasn’t yet made a statement, Jack. As you can imagine, he’s overwhelmed by what’s happened in the last couple of days. All I can confirm to you at the moment is that Father Jerome is indeed here with us at the monastery.”

“But you’ve talked to him, haven’t you?” Roxberry asked, through her earpiece.

“Yes, I have,” she affirmed.

“And what did he tell you?”

Roxberry’s frustration was coming through loud and clear, and Gracie’s cagey replies weren’t helping. She’d avoided mentioning to him that they’d shown Father Jerome the footage of the sightings, and hadn’t shared what he’d told them in the cave. She and Finch had sifted with great care through what she would or wouldn’t say, deciding that it wasn’t their place—not yet, anyway—to announce things that the priest had said in confidence and that could be taken wildly out of context and distorted at will, which was inevitable. Hard as it was to keep a huge scoop like that to themselves, they’d agreed that it was more appropriate to give Father Jerome the chance to tell his story himself, if and when he chose to do it. They’d approach him for a live interview as soon as he’d had a chance to rest and let it all sink in.

“He asked us to respect his need for a bit of peace right now, which we fully understand.”

She could almost feel Roxberry’s rising blood pressure throbbing through her earpiece.

She and Finch had also debated whether or not to use the material they’d shot inside the cave. Gracie felt they’d been granted a privileged viewing, and she had misgivings about airing the footage, feeling as if she’d be betraying the priest’s trust. But, as Finch had pointed out, they couldn’t not use it either. It was too good for that, it was part of the story, and besides, the British documentary crew had been allowed to film it for broadcast purposes. It was already airing around the world. He couldn’t see the harm in simply confirming it, and Gracie had agreed.

She signed off, expecting an instantaneous and irate callback from the news desk, and stepped over to the edge of the flat roof. The roof had nothing but a low, three-inch lip around it, and Gracie felt a bit uneasy looking at the sharp drop-off. As she gazed beyond it at the flat, barren landscape outside the monastery’s walls, she also had a different kind of bad feeling. The trickle of headlights bouncing across the desert was growing ominously as more and more cars converged on the monastery. She knew the region well enough to know how quickly things got out of hand, how suddenly religious passions got inflamed and escalated into bloodshed. She tore her gaze away from the eerie light show and joined Finch and Dalton, who were huddled around the open laptop, watching the Al Jazeera reporter’s live broadcast from outside the gates.

“Weird, isn’t it?” she observed, overcome by a sudden tiredness and setting herself down cross-legged beside them. “Sitting here, inside the gates, watching ourselves from the outside in.”

“It’s like a bizarro-world version of a hostage situation,” Dalton intoned.

Gracie noticed a shift in the shadows coming out of the roof hatch to her left, and saw Brother Ameen’s head pop out. He gave them a subdued nod and climbed up the rickety ladder to join them.

“How’s Father Jerome?” Gracie asked.

He shrugged wearily. “Confused. Scared. Praying for guidance.”

Gracie nodded in empathy, frustrated that she couldn’t give him any answers herself. She knew that the pressure he was under was only starting. Watching the streaming news reports on the laptop only confirmed it. The reports coming in from Cairo and Alexandria were troubling. The revelation that Father Jerome had effectively foreseen what was still unexplained was causing a huge stir across the country. The polarization of opinions was already clear, even though the story had barely broken. The clips chosen for broadcast showed the local Christians to be confused, but generally excited, by the news. For them, Father Jerome had long been a beacon of positive transformation, and on the whole, they seemed to be embracing his involvement as something inspirational and wanted to know more. The Muslims who were interviewed, on the other hand, were either dismissive or angry. And, Gracie thought cynically, probably chosen for how inflammatory—hence attention-grabbing—their reactions were. Clerics were denouncing Father Jerome and calling on their followers not to be swayed by what they were already describing as trickery.

She glanced over at the young monk. His face was tight with tension.

“What is it?” she asked him.

He kept his eyes on the screen for a moment, then turned to her.

“I don’t understand what this thing is that you all saw. I don’t understand Father Jerome’s visions either, or how they’re both related. But there are some things I do know. Egypt’s not a rich country. Half the people around here have little or no education and live on less than two dollars a day. Even doctors in public hospitals don’t get paid more than that. But we’re also a very religious country,” he continued, his eyes drifting off to the chaotic light show below. “People take comfort in their religion because they don’t see hope in anything else around them. They don’t have faith in their politicians. They’re tired of traffic and pollution and rising prices and falling wages and corruption. They have no one else to trust but God. It’s the same everywhere else in this part of the world. Religious identity matters more to people out here than their common citizenship. And here, in this country—we’re on a knife edge as far as sectarian differences are concerned. It’s taboo to talk about it, but it’s a real problem. There have been a lot of incidents. Our brothers at the Abu Fana Monastery were attacked twice in the last year. The second time, they were beaten and whipped and made to spit on the cross.” He paused then turned, his eyes bouncing between the three of them before settling on Gracie. “There’s a lot of tension and a lot of misunderstanding between the people of this country. And there are millions of them within an hour’s drive of here.”